


two lovers, darkly

by lilithenaltum



Category: Black Panther (2018), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood Drinking, F/M, Immortality, Mild Sexual Content, Minor Violence, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 17:55:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17047865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilithenaltum/pseuds/lilithenaltum
Summary: there’s blood in the rainwater, in the clouds, in the sky. there’s blood always, and there’s honey and there’s her, forever and never.{a story about bloodlust and love against all odds}





	two lovers, darkly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rxinventlove (urwasted)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/urwasted/gifts), [Malaiikka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malaiikka/gifts), [misstoryunfolded](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misstoryunfolded/gifts), [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts), [PrincessDarcy_of_Asgard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessDarcy_of_Asgard/gifts), [baby_bubastis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/baby_bubastis/gifts).



 

> | Fanmix on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/melanimal/playlist/1Ni6MoT38dc2thF5YBXS4y?si=spt35EfIQH-_sjo1M7LBwQ) | 

 

* * *

 

 _The only thing that hurts me to die, is that it's not love_ _._

一Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

* * *

 

 

 

The truth of the matter is this: there is no truth.

 

There is no real world, no actuality, no concrete time or space or place or planes. There is nothing but blood. There's blood in the rainwater, in the clouds, in the sky. There’s blood always, and there's honey and there's her, forever and never. When he really digs down and thinks about it, in the quiet after of whatever destruction she’s wrought or in the heavy damp of nighttime, he realizes that nothing really existed before this.

 

Nothing existed before Shuri. Absolutely _nothing_.

.

.

.

 

Once upon a time in a faraway land-no, scratch that.

 

The land isn’t so far when he puts things into perspective. He has time to now. She’s asleep, the natural (unnatural) cycle of her waking and slumbering coinciding beautifully with the drift across the stars and the crest of the solar waves. She’ll wake and she’ll be hungry (I’m so hungry, she’d said, sobbing...I’m always so hungry) and he’ll have to feed her but for now, he can think.

 

Where was he? He’s forgetful in his old age. Ah, yes. A faraway land. Or something like that. He thinks _hidden_ is better.

 

A hidden gem. That’s what they’d called Wakanda. It was a hidden gem of pristine clarity and cut, a diamond in the heart of the African continent, untouched and preserved from the stains of colonization and filthy white hands. They hid in plain sight. It was like searching for gold in the hall of kings only to find years later that the bars had been resting heavily in the pockets of the maid. Most of the world wouldn’t understand the isolation, the so called deception, but Tony did, even as he longed to grasp hold of that hidden gem and turn it over in his hand and observe.

 

That was all he wanted, he’d told himself, an observation. A study.

 

And how selfish had he been? Prostrating himself without shame for any chance to see the beauty of Wakanda and grace the palace halls, to dine on blood oranges so big and so sweet it made his eyes water, his chest ache. This was paradise uncovered. This was utopia.

 

And at the very heart of that paradise was the princess.

 

He thinks he’d loved her the second he’d met her, all smooth brown skin and a smile that held every good secret and perfect present on the Earth. He thinks, when he hears her talk and explain the minor details of her discoveries and the mechanics of her inventions, that she’s heaven’s breath and an angel’s mirror, all shiny and brilliant and bright. She blinds him. He likes the burn of it. He sends her little lingering stares and hopes he doesn’t (does) get caught, hopes she stares back and gets enraptured as surely he is. He hopes this for a long time, over weeks and months of back and forths between New York and Birnin Zana. The king is gracious, the queen mother welcoming, and the blood oranges taste sweeter every time he bites into the sanguine flesh. But it’s the princess he wants to drag into the bowels of the palace, into the hidden dusted tunnels she’d shown him one night when the sky was purple and the sun long gone. He wants to devour her whole and keep her inside him where she can become part of him, because he is madly and utterly and always has been in love with her.

 

He likes to think he’d been waiting on her.

 

She’s 24 to his 50, limber where he creaks, slender and supple where he’s gone soft. He’s still got something about him, though, or he thinks so, because she reaches up with sticky hands after she’s done with the sweets he brings her on every visit and taps his nose with a sweet little curl of her perfect lips.

 

_‘We don’t have these here’, she’d said._

_‘Kisses?’ he asked, stupidly, and she’d laughed._

_‘Oh no, Tony Stark’, she’d said. She always did that, called him by his whole name._ _‘We have kisses. And deep, too.’_

 

And then she had kissed him and he’d been lost forever, gone, completely under her thumb and her spell just from the sweetness of her lips and the taste of her tongue and the salt of her fingertips when he pushed her against the wall of the laboratory and hiked up her little skirts.

 

Their affair is quiet. He loves freely and always has and always will. Men or women or anyone else, it didn’t matter. He loved those who loved him and Shuri did. She said she loved him, with a breathless sigh after he’d brought her to the zenith of another climax. She told him while they shared kisses in quiet corners and snuck in little touches and tastes of skin in the expanses of the palace. In the back of his head he knows he shouldn’t hold out the hope that he could ever truly have her; she’s a princess after all, real life royalty and what is he but a dirty dog on a chain for her?

 

He’s nothing while she’s everything but he’d never hold that against her.

 

Instead, when her brother finds the two of them mid embrace, when he’s ripped from her arms and brought before the council on charges of indecency, when the kind eyes and soft smiles turn ice cold and hard as flint, he pleads for mercy. Not for him, but for her.

 

“You’d risk your own life to protect her?” the king asks, and Tony nods, no hesitation, because he would. He thinks he sees a bit of pity in T’Challa’s eyes. It doesn’t matter if he does or not because he’s ripped away from her and barred from Wakanda and from her.

 

She sobs when he boards the jet back home. He doesn’t cry until he’s halfway across the ocean, in the quiet solitude of his quinjet. He doesn’t cry until he realizes that he’ll never see her again, his exile for life, the little mercy the king granted to him simply sparing his life when right now, he should be dead. He thinks perhaps, that is worse.

 

.

.

.

Two years pass and he thinks he dies a little bit every day he’s away from her. He has no more access to the princess of Wakanda than he’d had before he met her and it’s a painful, cruel way to live. He contemplates defying his exile and the order placed on him not to step foot in the country again. He knows she’d never forgive him if he were to get killed that way, so he stays put and snatches each little crumb he can of her from the paltry media that the crown puts out, details about her ventures overseas and promotions for inventions she wanted to share with the world. And there’s always, always, always the underlying threat that if he even thought about trying to reach her this way, there would be hell to pay.

 

He gets the news that she’s marrying on his 52nd birthday. He spends it alone in his compound, curled up around a pillow and nursing a whiskey and a broken heart. He decides then it’s no use in moping about and holding on to a false hope, so he buries his love for the princess deep down in the pit of his heart and struggles to move on. He starts to date again, though it’s fruitless, and pours himself into his work. Stark Industries grows under the careful coordination of Pepper and himself; she says nothing about the heartbreak he wears like a shroud and for that he’ll always be grateful.

 

If he watches every little detail about her upcoming nuptials, that is his business. He’s a masochist. He almost revels in the pain of it.

 

Her betrothed is everything he isn’t. He is young and wealthy, perhaps even more than Tony is, but in a place like Wakanda, that isn’t a difficult feat. He’s handsome too, tall and cut from dark marble, with a smile so beautiful that even Tony finds himself a little caught up in the circle of his allure. He makes the tabloids with the princess, accompanies her to multiple engagements, gives witty and warm comments in beautifully accented English and Spanish and Dutch and German and, and, and. Tony would hate him if he didn’t think he were a perfect match for Shuri. She deserved someone as elegant, as cultured, as well read and intelligent as her fiance.

 

And then the week before her wedding comes and he shuts down, faced now with the very real, almost crippling reality that the woman he loves and has loved and will always love is going to marry someone else. He doesn’t leave his lab for days and avoids the phone and stays away from the internet. He doesn’t want to see the few scant details he knows the crown will let slip loose. He doesn’t want to imagine she’ll take this other man, the better one, as her husband and leave his memory in the dust. He was just a fling, after all, just something she’d done as a youthful indiscretion. And the longer he can avoid this inevitability, this truth, the longer he can keep breathing.

 

But there are no truths. Not really.

 

Seven hours after her wedding was rumored to have begun, he gets a knock on his door. Or, it’s less a knock and more a breach of security protocols he’d put up that no one outside of Happy should have been able to access. Pepper knew to leave him be and Rhodey did as well. Everyone who meant anything to him had been kind enough to give him a wide enough berth so he could grieve in peace. Well, everyone but the one he loved the most.

 

She stood right outside his laboratory, eyes wide and filled with tears when he shuffles off the couch and no sooner did he open the glass doors, did she barrel down on him, smacking his chest and clawing at his shirt.

 

It’s almost too much to have her touch him again. He backs up, breathless and unbelieving because she still wore her wedding gown, a beautiful gold and white confection that skimmed her body and draped across the floor. Beads sparkled across her throat and shoulders, streamed down her head in the second half of her elaborate headdress. He has no idea where the other part is, but he doesn’t have time to ask.

 

“You didn’t come!” she finally manages to blurts out, heat behind her accusation and he doesn’t know where this is coming from.

 

“What?”

 

“You didn’t…” She shakes her head, wipes her face, and tries to steady her breathing. “You didn’t come. You didn’t stop me.”

 

He feels his body hollow out and he lets out a slow, pained breath. “I didn’t think I was expected to.”

 

“Did you really think I wanted to marry him?”

 

Tony sighs because he didn’t know. He hadn’t even dared to hope this was just for appearances and propriety. He’d tried the route of self preservation instead.

 

“Did you honestly believe I could just forget you so easily?” she demands of him again. She reaches up and cups his face, her hands shaking and clammy and he pulls her close, groans when she fits against him like a puzzle piece. She is perfect, even in the hurricane of emotions that swirl around her. She’s perfect and he loves her so much.

 

“I’m never supposed to see you again.”

 

“So?”

 

It’s said with all the incredulous disbelief of someone who’s not been told no much in her life and he can’t help but laugh.

 

“So, I’d really rather not die trying to get a peek at you, pretty baby.”

 

Her smile is like ripe sunshine and molten gold and he nearly burns beneath it. “You coward,” she breathes, but there’s no venom behind it. “He’d have not truly had you killed, you know. He was angry. He was...he’ll be angry with me now, I’m sure, but-”

 

“What did you do? Leave lover boy at the altar?”

 

When she doesn’t respond, her mouth curling up into a sly grin, he knows she had and he almost wants to laugh but doesn’t. Her fiance hadn’t deserved that. He almost feels sorry.

 

“You ran away from him for me?”

 

“I did.” She swallows, strokes the whiskers of his unkept beard and he lets his eyes close for just a second, just enough that if this is a dream, he can keep a hold of it for a little while longer. _I don’t want to wake up. Please don’t let me._

 

It is no dream, if the news is anything to go by. He curls up with her in bed after hours and hours of lovemaking, memorizing the lines of her slender, soft body and tasting the expanse of her flesh. She still tastes like heaven, feels even better, moans like an angel and holds him close to her beating heart. They turn on the television and she lets out a nervous, almost mollified chuckle at the brouhaha surrounding her disappearance. Someone leaks a shaky recording of the wedding and Shuri’s walk toward her would be bride groom, the moment that she’d somehow realized she couldn’t go through with the marriage and had bailed, running back down the aisle in a flurry of cream silk, the headdress left behind in her wake. Tony kisses her neck and soothes her frayed nerves when she tries to decide if she should go home or simply hide out with him in the compound.

 

She opts for the former, but after a week of working up her courage to do so. She insists she has to go alone and so she provides collateral, taking the string of beads from around her little waist and wrapping them around his wrist until he wears them like a bracelet.

 

“I’ll be back for this,” she promises.

 

And he believes her.

.

.

.

 

In the three years after, when she came back from Wakanda with reddened, fury filled eyes but a determination to do what she wanted, he fell even deeper in love with her. They took off on a grand, honeymoon like trip around the world. He’d been all over the planet before, enough times that none of what he’d seen should have even impressed him anymore, but he finds that in the company of his Shuri, he could find wonder in nearly anything. He sees things with new eyes, looks at everything through a rose tinted filter and ignores all the ugliness that seeps in every so often.

 

There’s talk of war, talk of something sinister and hidden threatening to reemerge for the first time in a millennia, of another invasion from somewhere far away. There’s the silence on the other end of the line when Shuri calls home, and a blur of her tears when she insists she’s just fine. There’s the blatant disapproval of those he considers friends and of the press and the public in general. They call him a predator, say he’d preyed on a young woman sheltered from the real world and had struck when he had her at her most vulnerable. He ignores most of it for as long as he possibly can, but paradise doesn’t last forever, and fairy tales didn’t exist without some sort of villain.

 

She goes out alone one warm summer night in Copenhagen to get the takeout they’d ordered. He almost always accompanies her when she ventures out, but he was in the bath and she insisted she could handle herself. He’s seen her fight, he knew she’d be fine alone. But the little crawl of apprehension in the back of his skull wouldn’t let him go and when she was gone for longer than an hour, longer than two, he shrugged on his jacket and his boots and went to go find her.

 

He didn’t need to look far. She stumbled toward him in the hall of their hotel, glassy eyed and bleeding from a cut to her neck. For a moment, he couldn’t move, ice sluicing through his veins as he finally started forward and ran to meet her, scooping her up into his arms and rocking her back and forth. “Shuri?!” he calls to her, cupping her cheek and sliding his thumb over her parched, parted lips. “C’mon baby, talk to me, c’mon!”

 

He knows he should get her to a hospital but his feet won’t move. He slides down against the wall and stuffs back a whine, a angry and remorseful cry because he should have gone with her this time, the way he always had. He shouldn’t have let her go alone. A low, pained moan comes from her mouth and her eyes focus on his for a moment before they slip back into her head and she starts to shake, screaming then, louder and louder until he can feel the ringing in his ears.

 

He runs, as fast as he can, to the lobby and begs for an ambulance or a doctor or someone, anyone. He doesn’t remember who helps them, only that she’s shivering cold and still screaming and it sounds like she’s dying.

 

He throws up in the quiet of the hospital, long after she’d stopped moving, long after the doctors say she’d died thrice, and that she hovered somewhere in the inbetween. She was dying.

 

And it was all his fault.

.

.

.

Later, they’ll say she’d been attacked. He knows this, of course but no one can explain _how_ or by whom. He’d seen it as the blood poured from the vein in her neck and onto his clothes and the carpet of the hotel corridor. She’d been attacked and he hadn’t been there to help her, to keep her safe. He doesn’t leave her bedside for days, watches the little heart monitor beep beep beep. It’s unsteady and on occasion he sees it stall and his body stills and clenches in anticipation that this is it, this is the end.

 

And one day, it finally is.

 

The monitor stops. He calls for the nurses who rush and do their best to revive her. There is no response and he drifts outside of his body as he watches them work, desperately, but it’s no use.

 

She’s dead. The princess, _his_ princess, is dead.

 

He doesn’t realize he’s screaming until he’s being hauled back from the room. He clenches at the door frame and refuses to budge, fights off the nurses and the doctors who come to pull him away from her. He won’t leave her, not now, not even though she’s gone. But his strength wanes and he slumps over in a heartbroken heap, a male nurse muttering something to him in stilted English that sounds like it could be comfort. He doesn't want comfort. He just wants Shuri back.

 

Hours creep by as he slouches in the sofa of the hospital waiting room. They’ll have to release her body soon, and he’ll have to fly back to Wakanda-exile be damned-so she can be buried with her father and grandparents. He hasn’t told anyone in her family what’s happened just yet. He wants to delay the inevitable. There’s the likelihood that war could happen because he’d run off with the princess and gotten her killed.

 

He keeps going over that in his head. He’d gotten her killed. He’d gotten her killed. He’d gotten-

 

A hurried pair of footsteps sound down the corridor and toward the emergency room. He doesn’t look up at first, not until he hears the first scream and then the thunder of running feet as nurses and staff clear the hallways. They’re all yelling something in Danish he can’t make out, but whatever it is sounds hurried and desperate. He gets up from his chair on shaking, creaking knees and watches for a moment, tries to suss out the situation. The superhero still in him wants to launch forward and into the fray and save who he can, but the scientist in him needs to investigate first. His hand hovers over the arc and the suit he carries with him everywhere and he creeps down the hall against the current of panicked bodies as the clear the emergency wing of the hospital.

 

It’s silent as death down the hall. Lights blink on and off and glass crunches beneath his feet, the swinging fluorescent casting a harsh, eerie glow on the walls. He looks in one room then another, finds them abandoned and emptied except for hers, the one she’d died in.

 

He almost collapses to find her sitting upright, the gown they’d tossed on her bleeding body torn and nearly falling from her shoulders. She shakes in what he thinks is a sob but he can’t be sure and doesn’t have the capacity to really recognize because when she turns to him, her eyes are red.

 

“Tony,” she says, voice shaking, her throat bobbing as she swallows, and he grasps the ground with trembling hands. “Tony, I’m...I’m hungry.” She blinks back tears and tilts her head as she watches him and sucks in deep breath after deep breath. And when she moves, she hisses, though he barely sees her move because it’s so fast, so quick. She shoots from the bed over to where he leans against the door and lifts her little hands to his face.

 

She’s so cold it burns.

 

“Tony?” she tries again, but he can’t get a word out his mouth because all he sees is red, all he feels is cold. And there are two little puncture marks on her neck from where she’d bled out but she isn’t dead, she’s talking to him right now. He’s lost his mind. It’s the only reasonable explanation.

 

“I’m hungry, Tony,” she tells him again, this time in a pained whisper, her eyes dilating crimson and black. “I’m so fucking _hungry_.”

.

.

.

He's in denial, though not nearly as much as she is. She turns the hospital room upside down and inside out and then collapses on the floor when she finally expends the energy she has. He holds her close, though she groans and hisses and pulls away.

 

"A vampire," she moans, crying and heaving and sobbing and her tears come out like blood. He wipes her face and realizes that it is blood. And he tries hard not to grimace. No matter what she is, she's still Shuri. At least, he hopes she is.

 

"There's been talks...they've said-"

 

"A vampire! I'm dead!" she screeches, pounding at his chest weakly. "I'm never going to see the sun again, I'm never...fuck!"

 

She starts to cry all over again until nothing is left and she's shaking in his arms. An hour passes, then another, and Tony's legs cramp beneath him but he doesn't move.

 

"I want you to kill me," she says angrily, and he shakes her a little because he's scared she means it. "I want you to drag me into the sun and watch me burn."

 

"I won't."

 

"I'm hungry," she says, voice choked with grief. "I'm starving and I know what I have to do and I don't want to, I don't want it, I won't."

 

"You will," he says tiredly. He's already tired and it's only been a few hours. But he's got to get used to this. This is his new normal because he won't leave her. He won't. 

 

"From whom? You?" she scoffs, pulls away from him, and stumbles out toward the window where the sun is still high in the sky. She dares to peel the blinds opened a bit but jerks back as the sunrays start to sizzle at her skin. She presses her palms to the wall and bows her head and laughs, bitterly.

 

"The sun loved me, once."

 

"I'm so sorry, pretty baby," he says, because he is. "I shouldn't have let you go alone."

 

Shuri shakes her head and slips back into bed for lack of much else to do at the time. She curls up and covers her face and doesn't speak for a long while.

 

Tony goes down to the empty lobby and grabs a coffee.

.

.

.

When he comes back she's rocking back and forth, holding her belly. 

 

"Tony," she whimpers, and something like a cry catches in her throat again. "Tony, make it stop. I'm hungry. I don't wanna be."

 

"There's probably some blood in here somewhere. In a bag, I'm sure." He leaves his coffee on the table and walks off to hunt for something for her to eat, but comes up mostly empty. There's two bags of AB in the sparse blood bank and it's probably not enough. When he returns, she's vomited all over the bedsheets and the floor and his coffee is gone.

 

"I can't have regular food anymore, I guess," she moans out, and he strokes her through the cramps, holds her still when her stomach pushes the remainders of the last bits of real food she'd had in it out. 

 

"Just blood, I guess." He hands her a bag and she stares at it dismally before sighing and opening her mouth, revealing two very sharp, very white fangs on either side of her mouth. It's one thing to know she's a vampire now. It's quite another to see it like this in person. He tries and fails not to stare.

 

"Go ahead and look, I suppose," she says resigned, and she bites into the bag, sucking the blood from it quickly and efficiently. He hands her the other and she does the same, smacking her lips as she waits to see if that had been enough to sait her. But it wasn't. Within an hour she's whining again and her skin starts to grey, her hands trembling with the need to feed. 

 

When he unbuttons the collar of his shirt and goes to her, she nearly pushes him away.

 

"I'm not going to feed on you," she says, angry and cold. "I'm not. I refuse to."

 

"Why?" Tony frowns and makes her look him in the eye. "You've gotta eat, pretty baby. And I'm here."

 

"Because I'll hurt you," she says, scared as a small child. "I'll kill you cause I don't know how to stop and I won't...you'll die and I..." She shook her head and tried to push him away again but he held firm. He wouldn't let her push him away again. She needed him and he would hold steady. 

 

"I'll push you off if you get too much, promise. I mean, I'm not exactly in the mood to die, but I don't want you to either."

 

"I'm already dead," she reminds him, her voice dry enough to make him smile. At least a bit of her panache was coming back. 

 

"Yeah, well. You're the prettiest dead person I've ever met, how about that?"

 

It didn't quite make her smile, but it was enough to relax her hold on his shirt. And this time, as he leaned in and peppered kiss after kiss to her skin-cold, almost impossibly cold skin-she shook and whimpered and held out for as long as she could but she finally opened her mouth to take a bite.

 

He doesn't realize it would hurt so much. And then, the pain gives way to something like bliss, like pure euphoria, a rush of endorphins so strong it made him shudder and moan. She fed from him desperately, sucking as much as her little mouth could hold at one time, drops of it sliding down his neck. The sensation throws him off and makes  him loopy and he can see the corners of his vision getting blurry until he knows he has to push her away. He almost hates to. It feels so good and she needs more, he knows she does. But he hadn't been lying when he said he didn't want to die. He holds her tight and taps her jaw and with a gasp, she pulls back, blood stained teeth disappearing into her mouth as she sucks the fluid from them orgasmically. He attempts a smile, but she doesn't return it, just stares at him hard, watching to see if he would turn the way she had or if he was close to death. 

 

“I love you,” he says, and he’s sure his eyes waver under her gaze like melted butterscotch candies. “I hope you know that.”

 

Her smile is ragged as his breathing, drops of his blood still on her pretty lips and dotting her pristine gown. If she’s going to feed this messy, he thinks, she’ll have to wear less white. But he hates that thought. There’s something symbolic and pure about white, about the bleached, stark, almost burning brightness of the collar of her hospital gown. If he were more a poet, he could probably explain it in much more romantic terms than just purity.

 

She’s just drained him of enough blood that his head swoons and his body temperature has dropped to dangerous levels, but she’s still pure to him and really, who else matters?

 

 _You’re all I have now,_ her eyes read. Bright dark eyes, brittle smile. _You’re all I have, Tony Stark. Please._

 

After that, he gives her little sips at a time, enough to keep her from starving but not enough to sait her hunger. She seems to have given up on trying to die. "I’m already dead,” she said again. “My heart doesn’t beat. It’s just a lump in my chest.” And her skin is still cold to the touch, but he doesn’t mind. He can adjust. He can do anything for her.

 

She slowly embraces her new life, or, he thinks, her existence. He watches with jealousy as she seduces this man and that, feeds from them like a buffet and tosses them to the side when she’s had her fill. It’s never enough to kill, and never quite enough to keep her satisfied. And one night, after too many days without enough blood to keep her settled, she drains too much too fast and the body slumps from her little hands like a heavy weight. She stares at it, and then at him, and Tony can say nothing at all because he knew eventually, this would happen.

 

She doesn’t feed for days and days. She gets weaker, eyes pale pink and her skin ashen grey and he begs her to eat.

 

“Please, Shuri,” he pleads, holding her cold, slight frame against his chest. Maybe she’ll smell the blood in his throat and take a bite. He almost doesn’t care if she drains him, so long as she doesn’t willfully try and waste away. “C’mon. You have to feed.”

 

“I don’t have to do anything,” she protests, albeit weakly. “It’s better if you destroy me now. I’m nothing more than a waste of flesh.” Her chuckle is dry when it rattles around in her throat and it makes him wince. “Take me outside in the morning and let me see the sunrise.”

 

“No.”

 

“Do it, Tony Stark!” she hisses, near to tears, but she’s so drained she can’t cry. She grasps the back of his neck with sharp nails and draws blood there, but he lets her. Let her get a whiff of him, the iron in his body, the life that flows through him. She needs him now and he won’t let her go.

 

“I won’t,” he says firmly, leaning down to brush his mouth against her own. She whimpers into it but she takes the kiss, barely kissing him back until his hands cradle her body and pull her even tighter against his chest. Inside it, the thump thud thump of his heart pumps heavily, and he knows it’s amplified in her ears. She sucks in air and groans against his mouth, her nails digging ever deeper until he can feel the wetness on the back of his neck and the blood drips into the collar of his shirt. When she pulls her hand away and leans her head back from his kisses, she sucks on her hands and fingers and almost sobs at the taste.

 

“You’re hungry, sweetheart,” he says softly. “C’mon and get a little bit.”

 

“I’ll drain you,” she says with shaking hands, but she lets him pull her up until her mouth is right at throbbing vein in his neck.

 

“You won’t,” he assures her. And even if she does, so be it. It’s a price he’s willing to pay if it’ll keep her from starving.

 

She feeds then, desperately and messily, blood flooding her mouth as she bites down just a little too hard and too deep. It’s painful in a way he can’t describe, but he stuffs back his cry of pain so she doesn’t panic and rip away. He might very well survive this if she doesn’t pull her fangs out too quickly, so he keeps his arms around her middle and keeps her cradled close for as long as he’s conscious, until he begins to slip under and the chill in the room is too much.

 

He wakes up a little while later with a bandage on his neck and her worried eyes watching him.

 

“I told you I would feed too much,” she says, when he blinks the sleep from his eyes. “I told you and you almost died and I-”

 

“It happens. I told you to do it.” He wants to shrug but his body still feels too heavy so instead, he lies back and offers her a weak smile. “I’ll be alright in a few days. Gotta rebuild my iron.”

 

She’s quiet for a long moment after, a moment in which she only studies him. He wonders what she’s thinking and almost asks, but she finally talks again and when she does, he can’t help but clench her hand in his own.

 

“Why would you do that? For me? For a monster?”

 

Tony smiles wider, his thumb stroking the knuckles of her little hand.

 

“Because I love you.” He swallows against a dry throat and she almost smiles back, he thinks. It’s hard to tell in the dim light of their room. “You do shit like that for the people you love.”

 

Shuri leans down and kisses his brow, her lips blissfully cool against his skin. “Maybe you’re right,” she finally concedes “But don’t you dare do that again.”

.

.

.

Eventually, he doesn’t have to.

 

Her appetite is insatiable and after a while she is able to push the guilt of draining the living down by the simple justification that it’s her versus them, her existence for their lives. She didn’t ask for this, she didn’t deign to become one of the undead at her own accord. And so, she can’t help that sometimes, her feedings get a little out of control and the bodies she leaves behind are empty husks. Either way, no one suspects that it’s her doing the feeding. Vampirism is apparently a contagious pandemic now.

 

Tony has to procure her meals the hard way when the competition starts to heat up. He seduces, sweet talks, bribes, and on occasion, he’s had to kidnap to give his princess a warm body to feast from for however long she can make this stretch. They try to limit her victims to people who wouldn’t be missed: convicts and criminals, the scourge of the underground. She digs in happily to pedophiles and rapists, doesn’t spare even a wink of her sleep during the day for abusers and murderers and drug pushers. It’s the dumb, unassuming ones that she feels terribly about, but those are reserved for days they can’t find any others.

 

Even so, it takes its toll. She starts to lose herself in the fray, her nights out partying and hunting the only respite she has against the emptiness that fills her heart.

 

“I can’t go home,” she tells him one night, when he’s near done dressing. They’re on their way out again, though not for a feeding. It’s something to do. She’s got an eternity in the shadows ahead and she’s embracing every bit of hedonism she can.

 

“You could. He would take you back, I know it.”

 

They don’t talk often about T’Challa or her mother, but when they do, her mood sours and she spends her evenings in bed, teardrops of blood on her pretty face and a cloud so dark around her head that nothing but time can move it out the way.

 

“Not when he’s seen what’s become of me,” she argues. “He’d turn me away and pretend as though I never existed.”

 

She’s stubborn and spiteful and so full of grief, but Tony is determined to prove her wrong. So he drops the conversation for now. Instead, he takes her out on the town into the dark, Berlin night, and they soak in the pretty lights and the hard liquor and the beautiful women. She brings a girl home, soft curves and dark hair and they share her too, until Tony’s spent and Shuri is flirting with disaster.

 

“Should I have her, as well?” she asks him, as he lies there heaving and sweaty.

 

He thinks for a moment of the consequences of their actions and realizes that in the darkness, there are no real consequences. The girl mews like a cat beneath Shuri’s thighs and strokes the smooth skin of his pretty baby’s belly as she waits. He waits. He watches as Shuri dips her tongue into ivory skin and suckles at salty breasts and then further, lower, where Tony had pushed and pulled and drug an orgasm so intense from their little lover, it had nearly done her in. And now his princess would drain her dry if he let her.

 

“At least let her live,” Tony says with a wave of her hand and Shuri grins, jerking the girl down by her hips until Shuri’s got a clear shot of her slim throat.

 

He closes his eyes to the sharp shriek of pain and listens as Shuri feeds ravenously.

.

.

.

When they finally go home to Wakanda, it’s been five years since she’d left. Five years since her would be wedding and seven since his exile. He’d forgotten how beautiful it is here, though he can’t quite see the beauty in the darkness. But he’s gotten used to the dark now. He’s fine with the midnight sky and the twinkle of stars, the shadows and the lowlights. It’s where he’ll live with Shuri until he dies or she gets tired of him. Whichever comes first.

 

She’s as nervous as a cat near water when they land. There’s been news from Wakanda, on and off, and a handful of messages from her mother to come home that she’d blatantly ignored. He doesn’t want to bring up any of that right now because he knows it’ll make things worse. So he pilots their jet down to the tarmac where her brother waits and he sits back until she finally moves, her shoulders straight and her head held high.

 

She doesn’t break down when she sees T’Challa, or Ramonda, or Nakia. She keeps her face mostly impassive as he waits on the landing strip and watches as she greets them all, formally and stiffly. It’s the kind of greeting he’d expect from a stranger and not a treasured daughter who’d disappeared half a decade ago.

 

But when the baby on Nakia’s hip starts to coo and gurgle, Shuri loses her composure and she chokes back a sob. He knows she won’t want to cry in front of them, at least not until she can tell them about her condition. She struggles to keep her eyes dry, to keep them dark and to keep from reaching out to take her baby nephew into her arms and snuggle him close. It’s one more reminder of something she’ll never have of her own, and it makes his chest ache so very badly. If only he’d given her a child before all this happened.

 

If only he’d gone with her and stopped it from happening to begin with.

 

There were too many if onlys to reckon with so he ignores them and joins her side, nodding respectfully at the king and queen and queen mother, a smile on his lips for the little prince.

 

“What’s his name?” Shuri asks, her voice choked with emotion. So many swirl inside her and he swears he can read her thoughts by now. He knows how this both burns inside her and brings her joy. How could two opposing things be so strong within her body?

 

“Kiwade,” Nakia says, tears on her cheeks because the lost sister had come home.

 

And then T’Challa gasps, reaching out with trembling hands to wipe away at his sisters eyes. There’s a moment where no one breathes, and no one moves, and Tony sighs deeply.

 

There’s blood on the king’s fingertips.

.

.

.

It is weeks before the odd dance around the princess ends. In those weeks she oscillates between antagonistic dismissal of them all to weeping dismay. He holds her through every mood swing and kisses her sweetly, gives her his wrist to sip from when her bloodlust spikes after a sharp drop in serotonin. Feeding makes her amiable. Feeding is the one thing keeping her from disappearing again, this time for good.

 

But a mother’s love is never ending no matter the circumstances and so it’s Ramonda who breaks the ice between them. She gathers her daughter into her arms and lets her cry on her chest, no matter the blood staining her beautiful dress.

 

“I can wash it, Bibi,” she says matter of factly, the deep, dream like timbre of her voice almost enough to make Tony feel as though all his sins are forgiven. He wonders why she doesn’t blame him for the mess her daughter has become. But she doesn’t. She welcomes him too, hugs him close and thanks him over and over for keeping Shuri alive.

 

“Not alive,” Shuri grumbles, but there’s a bit of a smile behind it.

 

“Well, whatever you are,” Ramonda says, decidedly, “you are home and you are mine. And I love you.”

 

And that was that.

 

Nakia came around soon after and so did Okoye. It would take T’Challa a bit longer yet to forgive and to forget and then to reconcile the creature in his sister’s bedroom to his sister. He was still politely withdrawn from Tony, but he didn’t mind. So long as he knew that his warmth grew stronger and brighter toward Shuri, it wouldn’t make him a bit of difference. And for what it was worth, the family seemed to have begun to accept him as well, a little at a time.  

 

Shuri doted on her nephew, and then the niece that followed a year after. She spoiled them rotten and settled back into her laboratory where nothing had been moved and everything preserved for her inevitable return. That had made her cry again, and she’d brought along her dark napkins and dotted her eyes daintily, as if the very fact that she was home again brought out the innate royal training that lived within her very bones. She started to research again, mostly about what kind of monster she was, and about possible cures, and about ways to feed that didn’t involve her lover or any other living, warm body.

 

“I probably should give that up,” she said, grinning as she sat curled up in his arms in her room. It was their room, now. He’d given up sleeping in the one he’d been given as a tentative guest of the royal family. “You know, the hunting. I think I’ve isolated a protein that I can use to make a synthetic.”

 

“Would that be the blood equivalent of junk food?”

 

She shrugged. “Maybe? But it’s better than killing just to eat. That’s what animals do.”

 

“We are animals, sweetheart,” he said without a trace of shame. “All of us are.”

 

She said nothing to that but she didn’t argue either, and he felt as thought that was a small victory in itself.

 

The synthetic she developed wasn’t that appealing, at first, but word got out that there was a substitute for blood in Wakanda and within a year, she began bottling and distributing it underground to the masses that lived in permanent darkness. Vampirism spread and so did her synthetic until murder rates dropped dramatically and blood sucking was more of a passtime than a curse. There was still a stigma, of course, great big protests and marches from the religious right and puritanical left who all thought of vampires as soul destroying abusive demons. But little by little, minds started to change. Articles were written, interviews conducted, and people began coming forward with their own stories of turning. They were still a vast minority, but they were becoming more and more accepted as years passed.

 

He was seventy two when she approached him with the idea of the serum.

 

“It’d work a lot like Captain Rogers’ had,” she told him, and he winced at the memory of Steve, long gone and killed protecting the Earth and all those who lived on her. He wondered what Captain America would think of vampires, if he’d be so inclined to judge if he knew Shuri was one. “I’ve got a bastardized version of it in my old files from when Bucky was here and-”

 

She shook her head then and gave him a soft, apologetic smile, as if the mention of her first love had somehow offended him. He still talked of Pepper, who lived in Connecticut with her children and her husband, so he couldn’t hold it against her if Bucky still dwelled somewhere in her heart. He wondered then where Barnes was now. Probably somewhere across the galaxy, carrying the mantle of White Wolf he’d been gifted by Wakanda with pride.

 

“So what’s it gonna do?”

 

“Keep you alive.” She paused and tapped her lip, her fang popping over it when she spoke again. “That’s if that is what you want.”

 

It was, if only because he knew she’d want to keep him beside her. No one quite understood or accepted her the way he did.

 

“If you need me, yeah, it’s what I want.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and winced at the creaks and pops of his joints. Hell, it would be nice to have something to rid him of this arthritis, too. “I’m assuming I’m your guinea pig?”

 

She nodded, almost bashfully. There was a gentleness in her that he hadn’t seen in a long while and he adored it. “I’m afraid so. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

 

“I don’t.”

 

“Good. Because if this doesn’t work and you die-”

 

“I won’t come back and haunt you,” he said with a chuckle. “I promise, pretty baby.”

 

Shuri clucked her tongue and sucked on a fang, the way she always did when she was a little bit nervous and trying not to show that she was. “That’s not very comforting. Maybe I want you to haunt me.”

 

But he wouldn’t have to worry about that because the serum didn’t kill him, and when he woke up on the table after hours and hours of rest, he felt better than he had in a long while.

 

She was bright eyed and chipper when she came to check on him. Her cool hands stroked down the expanse of his chest and she took his vitals and listened to him breathe.

 

“It’s a bit early to tell, but...I think it’s working.”

 

He took a glance in the mirror and made note of lines and greys that had cleared. He looked about the same as he had when she met him, fifty years old and mostly middle aged but still in good health. “I hate to complain, but you couldn’t have maybe gone back a bit further.”

 

Shuri snorted, swatting his shoulder playfully. “You should be good that I managed to get you that far,” she said, but there was a little bit of doubt in her voice. “Perhaps, with time, I can perfect it and you’ll get even younger.”

 

Tony cradled her face in his hands and kissed her softly. “Not too far back, sweetheart. 30 would’ve been perfect. I was in my prime at 30.” He stretched, slipped a black shirt over the blue light of his arc reactor and got off the table with a bit more energy than he’d felt when he’d gone to sleep. “But 50 works out alright.”

.

.

.

The formula could only do so much. He aged, though not as fast as normal and Shuri figured that once every few years, he’d need another injection. The batches were time sensitive and light sensitive, which wasn’t that big an issue at the moment. But should the necessary ingredients go extinct, they would be out of luck.

 

And, because Tony rarely had much luck, that’s exactly what happened. It was years before it did, of course. In the interim, life went on, mostly, as always.

 

People were born and people died. Ramonda passed away in her sleep at 85 a few years post serum invention, refusing the drugs on the basis of having lived her life the way she wanted. Shuri had been heartbroken, but she accepted the choice. And she’d offered it to anyone who wanted it, a small extension she kept in her laboratory under lock and key but gave without any charge. It was sort of an open secret that Princess Shuri had the key to never aging, except in truth, it was just a delay on the process. Vampires and their lovers could spend the rest of their lives together so long as they had the formula. And to Tony’s eternal surprise, not as many people opted to use it past a few more decades.

 

T’Challa only took a few injections as did Nakia, though Okoye declined as well. By the time that the mantle of Black Panther was passed on to her nephew, Shuri had extended the formula’s reach from a few years to half a century. And Tony took every dosage she tested, outliving his friends and his former lovers, grieving the loss of each with a sort of detached clear headedness that only came from pushing 100 years old.

 

He didn’t look a day over 50. He didn’t feel a day over 40. And he reflected on the forty some odd years he’d spent with Shuri in Wakanda on the eve of his 99th birthday, glancing out at the sparkling city of Birnin Zana and smiling as Kiwade’s young daughter trained outside with the Dora Milaje. To them, he was just Tony Stark, Aunt Shuri’s beloved, her eternal consort. Everyone knew Aunt Shuri would exist for all eternity, unless she otherwise chose not to. Everyone knew and nobody cared because it was a choice now. The humanity of a person was worth so much more than living forever. And it was odd to Tony how the tables had turned.

 

  
And yet, he somehow had anticipated this would be the case.

 

What he didn’t anticipate was that Shuri would get stir crazy at home again, forever 28 and wanting to see the galaxy. She built herself a grand ship and pieced together a beautiful lab inside it.

 

“For testing?” he’d asked.

 

“Maybe,” she’d said. And when she reached out her hand and asked him to come along, of course, he said yes.

.

.

.

They were gone but a few years when they got word the war had broken out.

 

She turned her ship around close to a little post on the outskirts of Neptune and rushed home to see what could be done, but she was too late.

 

He held her when they took in the ruins. Wakanda was gone. So was just about everything else, except for the few who had escaped underground and would live out short, painful lives in the harsh darkness of a nuclear winter.

 

Even a vampire couldn’t survive that kind of darkness, so with bloodstained cheeks and a hole in her chest, she turned back and kept going.

 

They wandered liked this for a long time it seemed, though Tony stopped keeping track. She kept holed up in her lab most of the time, slept whenever the notion hit her, and sucked down synthetic only when the hunger was too much. And they stopped at post after post, listening to whispers of a place called Sakaar, across the other end of the galaxy and too far from home.

 

Home was but a dream now. She set her course and filled the ship to keep him fed and watered and watched outside her viewport as stars streamed pass and years slipped by.

 

And somewhere along the way, Tony realized the serum wasn’t working anymore.

 

“No,” she whispered harshly, when she checked his blood and his dna and his bone marrow because his body had developed an immunity to her serum. “No, no, no, this...it can’t be...I can make it stronger! I can-”

 

He shushed her softly and held her hands and then her when she began to sob again.

 

“I don’t mind dying,” he said, sometime later when she had quieted. “I just hate the idea of me leaving you.”

 

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered in the dark of space. Space still gave him hives but her cold skin and her soft lips and her sharp fangs made it all better. And now he was going to die and leave her all alone...eventually. “Don’t leave me by myself, Tony Stark. You’re all I have left.”

 

Tony couldn’t find a word to say. So he said nothing at all.

.

.

.

She works on and off on a machine, but won’t tell him what it’s about. She doesn’t talk much at all about her work, though she does talk a lot about everything else.

 

She tells him memories of growing up in the sun, of how she misses the sunrise and the warmth of a new day. It still lives inside her dreams, but every day slips past and she is terrified she’ll forget. She’s afraid of forgetting. She’s afraid to live so long that she doesn’t remember her family or her friends or her life before. Before, before, everything is counted in terms of befores and afters. And all the while, Tony gets older and older.

 

His hair is shot silver and grey, and lines cover his face and his limbs move a bit slower. He takes longer baths and sleeps more, cuddles up beneath her chin as she reads to him and talks to him and one day he knows he’ll fall asleep and never wake up.

 

He hates that it’ll hurt her so. He hopes that someday she’ll find someone else like him, that will worship her and adore her and cherish her the way he has.

 

He is 154 when the tiredness is too much and all he wants to do is sleep.

 

“It’s still early,” she says, protest in her voice but there’s a tiredness there too, and he knows she holds on to him by a sliver of a hair. She’s tired of worrying he won’t wake up. He thinks maybe this will be a relief to her as well.

 

“I know, pretty baby. But I’ve gotta call it a night.”

 

“Alright.”

 

He lays his head down on her lap and she starts to sing, sharp nails gentle on his sensitive scalp, the liver spots and lines along his face a star map of the long, long life he’s lived. He shouldn’t have lived this long, but he has. He’s grateful he got to spend it with her. He’s grateful that he had her for as long as he did. He loves her so much and he feels it with every beat of his sluggish heart, the blue of his arc reactor fading as his eyes droop shut.

 

“I’ll make you pancakes in the morning,” she says with a tearful whisper. “And put chocolate kisses on top.”

 

He smiles against the skin of her hand and kisses her palm sweetly.

 

And then Tony falls asleep.

.

.

.

He thinks, when he stirs, that maybe last night wasn’t the night he’d finally die. Only, it really had been.

 

He’d gone to sleep the way he always did, after his supper, the soup like sawdust and water on his tongue and he supposes he’d never woken. Or, he did wake, but it was years before he did. That’s what she tells him, her eyes blurred with tears and red with hunger. She grasps him close and pulls him tight until he thinks her lungs breathe air into his and he’s alive again. Alive, though his heart whirls and thrums instead of beats. It’ll be an adjustment, but he knows he’ll get used to it.

 

“How long?”

 

There is a catch in her throat when she tells him, her mouth tight with the truth. But there is not truth, not really. There isn’t anything at all but her.

 

“50 years,” she says, clearing her throat when the tears clog the way. He wants to drink her tears and keep her safe and make her cry all over again, because she’s so beautiful when she cries. She feels. She always complained about feeling. _I’m so scared I’ll stop knowing how._ Instead, he smiles and pushes a bit of her hair from her face and watches the creases in her forehead disappear a little at a time.

 

“That’s how old I was when I met you,” he muses. She gives him a sharp nod and then her wobbling lip dips into a kittenish grin.

 

“I know.”

 

“Is that where I start over? At 50?”

 

She shakes her head. “No. At 30. You always said you were at your best at 30.”

 

He thinks it odd she’d remember something so mundane he’d said so long ago but then again, she’d probably remembered every little thing about him in the fifty years between his eyes closing and opening. He hates to think of her alone and cold on this ship with just the memories of the two of them and their old world and the promise what might lie ahead light years away. Promises were made to be broken, he knew that much. But perhaps this one held true.

 

He finally turns, staring out into the endless blackness, the dark sea of stars and constellations and nebula swirling in the viewport. It’s like watching the beginning of something at the same time as seeing its end. He drinks it in for long, silent minutes and leans against her chest, her unbeating heart as comforting as the chill of her flesh.

 

His princess. _His_.

 

“How long will this last?” he asks, tapping at his skin, and the machinery underneath.

 

“For as long as you want it to,” she says simply. Her voice is hesitant and quiet. “I’ve engineered it in such a way that if you wish, you never need die.”

 

He smiles. He likes the idea of immortality, so long as she be beside him. “I can stay with you forever, pretty baby.”

 

“Forever and ever.” She brushes her fingers across his jaw and blinks back tears. “Or at least, until I get tired of being around.”

 

Later, when she tells him where they’re headed now, he settles back in the plush bed she drags him to and watches the rise and fall of her as she rides him, her mouth open with heaving breaths and this time she does cry. Bloody tears fall down her cheeks and streak her skin and soak her chest and he leans forward, drinks the iron and saline from them, presses his fingers into the divots of her hips and pushes up until she gasps out his name in perfect, beautiful form.

 

Anthony.

Tony.

_My love._

 

He licks the sweat from her collarbone and trails a finger down her chest, around to a nipple and then under as she falls back and her sighs drift into something like exhaulations. When she’s spent, many more rounds later, she curls up underneath his arm and rests her head on his chest and her fingertips tap out the pattern of the thrumming inside him.

 

No more blue light, no more thump thud thump. There’s the sleek warmth of machinery there instead and the more he dwells on that, the more he likes it. It suits him. A man and a machine and wholly hers.

 

Shuri leans over towards the desk beside her bed and rattles her fingers into something shiny and immaculate. He realizes it's the silver bowl her sister in law had given her for her wedding so long ago, the one that never was. He wonders if she’d marry him now if he asked her. And then every other thought flies out of his mind when she peels silver paper from chocolate, sucks it into her mouth, sharp fangs scraping the candy as it melts on her tongue. She’ll get a stomach ache for eating candy, but maybe it’s worth it. She leans forward, presses her lips to his, kisses him like she’s never done it before. Sticky and sweet and perfect and he thinks he’ll cry now, but instead, he laughs.

 

_‘We didn’t have these back home’, she says._

_‘Kisses?’ he asks, threading his fingers through her hair, stroking her cheek, and she laughs._

_‘Oh no, Tony Stark’, she says._ _He loves that she still does that, loves that she’ll always call him by his whole name._

_‘We had kisses. Still do. And deep, too.’_

 

* * *

 

_Fin_

 


End file.
